Open Source Relational Database, PostgreSQL Version 8.1.1 Launches

Nova Scotia, Canada – (The Hosting News) – December 30, 2005 – As many web devlopers already know, PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. According to the website, www.postgresql.org, ”PostgreSQL has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows. It is fully ACID compliant, has full support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages). It includes most SQL92 and SQL99 data types, including INTEGER, NUMERIC, BOOLEAN, CHAR, VARCHAR, DATE, INTERVAL, and TIMESTAMP. It also supports storage of binary large objects, including pictures, sounds, or video. It has native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, among others, and exceptional documentation.

An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting. It is highly scalable both in the sheer quantity of data it can manage and and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate. There are active PostgreSQL systems in production environments that manage in excess of 4 terabytes of data. Some general PostgreSQL limits are included in the table below.”

Limit

Value

Maximum Database Size

Unlimited

Maximum Table Size

32 TB

Maximum Row Size

1.6 TB

Maximum Field Size

1 GB

Maximum Rows per Table

Unlimited

Maximum Columns per Table

250 – 1600 depending on column types

Maximum Indexes per Table

Unlimited

Designed, built and tested by a large and thriving community and backed by a growing number of corporate sponsors and support companies, the new version 8.1.1 will expand the scope of PostgreSQL application development.

The new release includes performance improvements and advanced SQL features which will support larger data warehouses, higher-volume transaction processing and more complex distributed enterprise software.

New features in this release include:

Roles: PostgreSQL now supports database roles, which simplify the management of large numbers of users with complex overlapping database rights.

IN/OUT Parameters: PostgreSQL functions now support IN, OUT and INOUT parameters, which substantially improves support of complex business logic for J2EE and .NET applications.

Improved Multiprocessor (SMP) Performance: The buffer manager for 8.1 has been enhanced to scale almost linearly with the number of processors, leading to significant performance gains on 8-way, 16-way, dual-core, and multi-core CPU servers.

Bitmap Scan: Indexes will be dynamically converted to bitmaps in memory when appropriate, giving up to twenty times faster index performance on complex queries against very large tables.

Table Partitioning: The query planner is now able to avoid scanning whole sections of a large table using a technique known as Constraint Exclusion.

Shared Row Locking: PostgreSQL’s “better than row-level locking” now supports even higher levels of concurrency through the addition of shared row locks for foreign keys.